iPhone 5 A6 doubles iPad 3 score and beats S3?

Take this with a pinch of salt, but a supposed Geekbench score has revealed that the Apple-modified, 1GHz ARM V7 chip in the new iPhone 5, a dual-core A6, outpaces many other smartphones - as well as Apple’s own flagship iPad 3 tablet - when it comes to raw number crunching in version 2.3.4 of the iOS benchmark.

With 1601 points to its name, the supposed iPhone 5 benchmark score dug up by 9to5Mac beats the 1560-scoring Galaxy S3 with its quad-core Exynos processor, while the likewise quad-core Tegra 3 chip in the Asus/Google Nexus 7 manages 1591. Of course, the Galaxy Note 2 will have a faster CPU still and the Nexus 7 is not exactly the fastest-clocked Tegra 3 around, but this is impressive stuff nonetheless.

However, don’t base too much on these scores even if they are true. After all, artificial benchmarks rarely tell the full story, as is interestingly demonstrated by the fact that the HTC One S, with its 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor, is ranked far below the above devices – despite the S4 architecture being known to beat a similarly clocked Tegra 3 in a number of scenarios. Also, depending on how heavily threaded an app or the OS itself are, an extra two cores may well come in handy.

Anyway, if you want bragging rights to the best performance, keep an eye out for the new LG flagship phone that’s just been announced in Korea, the LG Optimus G. This mega-smartphone with its 4.70-inch HD IPS screen packs in the newest quad-core version of Qualcomm’s S4 along with lightning-fast Adreno 320 graphics, and backs them with a whopping 2GB of RAM (just like on some versions of the S4).

However, you’ll need to wait till the beginning of 2013 to get your hands on one of those, so for now it would appear the iPhone 5 might well be able to put a feather in its cap. Of course, we’ll have to see if performance numbers across the board with confirmed retail iPhone 5s will match the potential being shown off here, and even the Note 2 may already kick it off its high spot.